How I See It

A gripping exposé of Jeremy Kyle brought back my own teenage humiliation

Back in the swirling mists of time, aged about 16 or 17, I was a guest on Kilroy. Do you remember Kilroy? It was a BBC One daytime talk show that ran for nearly 20 years.

Its host, Robert Kilroy-Silk, began the series in 1986 as the epitome of charm (a former

Labour MP, tanned and handsome with a smooth vocal burr), but finished in the new millennium all strange and angry, axed after he wrote a furiously anti-Arab column in the Sunday Express. He rattled around the chat show circuit for a while complaining that free speech was dead, joined UKIP, got elected as an MEP, branded UKIP incompetent, launched his own party, got voted out first from I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! and we didn’t really hear from him again.

He’ll be 80 in a couple of months. I wonder how he is? Perhaps he calmed down again with age and is now a chuckling grandpa, enjoying country walks and a bit of Radio 4. Or perhaps he sits ranting at bus stops. We can’t know. But I’m not one to judge; Only Connect is bound to be cancelled one day and I expect to follow a similar trajectory. I don’t know who I’ll be racist about, but I’m thinking perhaps the Danish. I like a challenge.

Anyway, it was a harrowing appearance on Kilroy for the teenage me. I thought about it this week as I watched Channel 4’s gripping two-parter about the ghastly rise and fall of The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Robert KilroySilk must have been baffled by The Jeremy Kyle Show. As he railed against cancellation and wokery (or whatever they called it back then), he will surely have been told that his show couldn’t work after he’d shown so much rage. Kilroy-Silk was the housewives’ favourite; daytime viewers had been reassured by his soothing voice and sympathetic orange face. How could it continue when he’d said such horrible things? You wouldn’t get that with Lorraine Kelly! Richard and Judy were nice about everyone!

But within months of Kilroy going off air, along came Jeremy Kyle. Furious from the off. Shouting at everyone, nose-tonose with his own guests as he flecked them with spittle while pouring scorn on their life choices.

How can this be, Robert Kilroy-Silk must have bitterly thought, when he himself couldn’t even say rude things about people in a faraway country? Was it just the cringing lefty BBC, Kilroy-Silk must have wondered, who clamped down on free speech, while open-minded ITV had sufficient vision to hire the really venomous talk show host that a jaded world was waiting for? We can’t know. At any rate, Jeremy Kyle was different. How different? First: here’s what happened when I went on Kilroy. At the time, I wrote a weekly column in The Daily Telegraph. This meant that I was occasionally asked to speak “on behalf of teenagers” about sex and acid house parties, although you’d think that writing a column in The Daily Telegraph wasn’t much of a qualification. If my life was full of sex and raving, I very much doubt I’d have bothered to do that as well. Nevertheless, I tried my best to speak up.

When Kilroy said they were having a debate on abstinence for the young generation, inviting me along to be a voice against the notion, I said OK. I myself was abstinent through social awkwardness rather than principle, but I was happy to speak for those who had a bit more fun at weekends.

Robert Kilroy-Silk himself sat next to me at the top of the show. The cameras rolled and he indicated the woman on his other side. I forget her name, but let’s call her Helen.

“Helen,” declared Robert Kilroy-Silk, “is 27 years old and still a virgin. She’s waiting for marriage. Victoria, on the other hand, thinks this is completely unnecessary”.

Or words to that effect. Well, you can imagine what the audience assumed. For the next half hour, this other lady and I were held up as the opposing poles of sexual habit. She, abstinent.

Me, having it away with half the Home Counties.

“I’d be surprised,” shouted an old lady in the back row, “if Victoria doesn’t have some sort of disease!”

Look, I survived. This was by no means the worst thing that happened to me as a teenager, and blessedly there was no internet – but it was an infuriating, frustrating and humiliating experience. Anyone on those shows was cannon fodder. If that’s what it was like for me, invited on as a guest newspaper columnist, what on earth was it like for those who had no other voice, no other power, and who had gone to Jeremy Kyle in the forlorn hope of overcoming addiction, saving a marriage or reuniting with children?

Jeremy Kyle: Death on Daytime showed us what it was like. Savage, exploitative and cruel. We saw how vulnerable guests had been pushed and provoked, wilfully misled and misrepresented, spuriously and publicly accused of lying, driven to terrible misery and shame. In at least two cases, suicide followed. This is a heartbreaking and brilliant documentary, worth seeking out on All 4: it’s pacy, enthralling and important. Its scope is wide and deep, even raising – as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night does – big, complex questions about the viewers’ responsibility for what happens.

Thank God for the calm morality of MP Damian Collins, district judge Alan Berg and the anonymous production whistleblowers, all of whose presence in the documentary acted as vital reminders that humanity does exist. Even in television.

‘I’d be surprised,’ yelled one old lady, ‘if Victoria doesn’t have some sort of disease!’